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Behind Bars ... Sort Of

Go ahead and say it; everyone does. Certainly I did. Here’s a striking building, perched on a slope outside the small Austrian town of Leoben — a sleek structure made of glass, wood and concrete, stately but agile, sure in its rhythms and proportions: each part bears an obvious relationship to the whole. In the daytime, the corridors and rooms are flooded with sunshine. At night, the whole structure glows from within. A markedly well-made building, and what is it? A prison.

Everybody says this, or something like it: I guess crime does pay, after all. Or, That’s bigger than my apartment. (New Yorkers, in particular, tend to take this route.) Or, Maybe I should move to Austria and rob a couple of banks. It’s a reflex, and perfectly understandable, though it’s also foolish and untrue — about as sensible as looking at a new hospital wing and saying, Gee, I wish I had cancer.

To be more accurate, free people say these things. Prisoners don’t. Nor, for the most part, do the guards, the wardens or the administrators; nor do legal scholars or experts on corrections; nor does Josef Hohensinn, who designed the Leoben prison. They all say something else: No one, however down-and-out or cynical, wants to go to prison, however comfortable it may be.

Still, the argument goes, the place must be a country club for white-collar criminals. (No, it holds everyone from prisoners awaiting trial to the standard run of felons.) Then it must cost a fortune. (A little more than other prisons, maybe, but not by much — as a rule, the more a corrections center bristles with overt security, with cameras, and squads of guards, and isolation cells, the more expensive it’s going to be.) And that’s glass? (Yes, though it’s shatterproof. And yes, those are the cells and that is a little balcony, albeit caged in with heavy bars, and below it is a courtyard.) The whole thing seems impossible, oxymoronic, like a luxury D.M.V., and yet there it is.

One gray day in February, Hohensinn drove me from his office in Graz down to Leoben, an hourlong trip through a region isolated by mountains and still transitioning out of an industrial economy. He is a compact man in his early 50s, with bushy eyebrows, a gappy smile and an air about him of cheerful confidence, mixed with a kind of Alpine soulfulness. Before the prison opened, late in 2004, he had a solid career building public housing. Now he is the Man Who Built That Prison, a distinction that dismays him slightly, if only because, as he says, “One always has mixed feelings about having one work singled out for attention.”

Leoben has received quite a lot of attention. In America, its public profile has been limited to a series of get-a-load-of-this e-mail messages and mocking blog posts (where the prison is often misidentified as a corrections center outside Chicago), but in Europe, Hohensinn’s design has become more of a model — not universally accepted, but not easily ignored either. It is the opening statement in a debate about what it means to construct a better prison. Already there are plans to build something like it outside of Berlin.

The day Hohensinn and I visited, Leoben was dreary, and there were traces of sleet in the air; as we approached, the building looked both idle and inviting, like a college library during winter break — or it would have, anyway, were it not for the razor wire coiled along the concrete wall of the yard and the sentence carved below it, a line from the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (which the United States signed and ratified) that reads: “All persons deprived of their liberty shall be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person.”

Inside the prison it felt like Sunday afternoon, though in fact it was a Tuesday. There was a glassy brightness over everything, and most surprising, an unbreakable silence. Prisons are usually clamorous places, filled with the sound of metal doors opening and closing, and the general racket that comes with holding large numbers of men in a confined space. Noise is part of the chaos of prison life; Leoben was serene. I mentioned as much to Hohensinn, and he smiled and pointed to the whitewashed ceilings. He had taken great care to install soundproofing.

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Soft Time: The courtyard at the Leoben prison.Credit
Alfred Seiland for The New York Times

An assistant warden accompanied us on our tour, one of three guards on duty tasked with watching more than 200 inmates. On one side of the prison there was a block of prisoners on remand; on the other side were the convicts, living in units called pods — groups of 15 one-person cells with floor-to-ceiling windows, private lavatories and a common space that includes a small kitchen. We came upon one prisoner cooking a late lunch for a few of his podmates; we stood there for a bit, chatting. They were wearing their own clothes. The utensils on the table were metal. “They are criminals,” Hohensinn said to me, “but they are also human beings. The more normal a life you give them here, the less necessary it is to resocialize them when they leave.” His principle, he said, was simple: “Maximum security outside; maximum freedom inside.” (The bars over the balconies are there to ensure the inmates’ safety, Hohensinn said; the surrounding wall outside is more than enough to make sure no one gets free.)

We walked around some more. There was a gymnasium, a prayer room, a room for conjugal visits. I asked Hohensinn what he would do if, contrary to fact, it were conclusively proved that prisons like his encouraged crime rather than diminished it. Would he renounce the design? He shook his head. “The prisoners’ dignity is all I really care about,” he told me.

Suppose we can’t bring ourselves to be quite so magnanimous. Suppose all we’re interested in is reducing crime. If you trust a criminal with a better environment, will he prove trustworthy? As far as Leoben is concerned, it’s too soon to tell. The place has been open for only four years. But I noticed something as we were leaving, and in the absence of any other data it seemed significant. In the three or four hours we spent roaming all through the place, I hadn’t seen a single example of vandalism.

It sounds odd to say, but it’s nonetheless true: we punish people with architecture. The building is the method. We put criminals in a locked room, inside a locked structure, and we leave them there for a specified period of time.

It wasn’t always so. Prison is an invention, and a fairly recent one at that: it wasn’t until the 18th century that incarceration became our primary form of punishment. True, there have been dungeons and the like for quite some time, but they were generally for traitors and political enemies and, later, debtors. More common criminals could expect other forms of penalty: execution, for example, and various kinds of corporal punishment; forced labor and conscription; public humiliation; the levying of fines; exile; loss of privileges and offices; and so on. We’ve come to consider most of these barbaric, unjust or wildly impractical, but their very existence should tend against the idea that settling with criminals by putting them in a building is a natural thing to do.

To be sure, there’s something about prisons that engages man’s imagination. Alberti discussed them, Piranesi drew them, Jeremy Bentham proposed them. But the imagination of incarceration rarely translates directly into design. Bentham’s Panopticon, a circular structure with an all-seeing guardhouse in the middle, was meant to show that surveillance was as powerful a method of control as shackles and door locks — an idea that has proved enticing to many an academic, though it was never built.

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In fact, for a long time many prisons, including some of the most well known — the Tower of London, for example — were repurposed castles, fortresses and gates; and even in the U.S., where such legacy buildings didn’t exist, prison construction was an ad hoc affair. Among the first people to try to blend ideology, morality and design principles into a carefully planned building were the Quakers of Pennsylvania, whose late-18th-century model was characteristically spare, consisting primarily of cells where convicts were to be kept in strict isolation, that they might better explore their own souls and find a way to God. A competing system, known as the Auburn model, arose a few years later. It focused more on the potential rehabilitative powers of labor, so it included larger spaces where prisoners could work together; but it, too, called for them to spend the rest of their time alone.

And there, for the most part, the thinking simply stops. Surveillance techniques come and go, materials change, levels of security are introduced and refined. The language changes, from “penitence” to “incarceration” to “corrections,” but very little is fundamentally different than it was. You can get it in a rectangle or a circle, in a radiant or a telephone-pole style, in brick or concrete or shipping containers; you can get guardhouses conducting surveillance via closed-circuit TV, electronic doors, an isolation room. But it’s pretty much the same building: a large institution, holding many convicts in small cells for years at a time.

Does imprisonment work? It seems like a bottom-line question, but the answer depends on what you want prisons to do, and that’s not an easy thing to decide. Even if we assume that there are good and sensible reasons to incarcerate people, there remains some debate about what purpose is served. Deterrence is often proposed as a goal, but no one really knows whether the prospect of incarceration gives would-be criminals pause, and in any case we quickly reach the realm of diminishing returns. “It’s absurd to think that the worse you make these places, the less recidivism you’ll have,” said Michael Jacobson, who was commissioner of the New York City Department of Corrections under Mayor Rudy Giuliani and is now the director of the Vera Institute of Justice, a research group that focuses on criminal justice. “For one thing, it’s hard to make a lot of these places worse. Besides, people commit crimes after serving sentences in the third ring of hell. You’re not going to stop them by demoting them to the fourth ring.” Moreover, most crimes are committed either in the heat of the moment or by career criminals who consider themselves invincible. Few people in either group think about where they might wind up. When I asked one of the prisoners at Leoben if he was surprised by how nice it was, he said no; what surprised him was that he’d been caught in the first place.

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A single-occupancy cell (and its occupant). In the foreground, a private kitchenette.Credit
Alfred Seiland for The New York Times

In fact, though most of us are reluctant to admit it, we mainly use prisons as storage containers, putting people there with the hope that, if nothing else, five years behind bars means five years during which they can’t commit more crimes. It’s called warehousing, and we do a lot of it. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, by far — it is more than five times as high as in the U.K. About 1 in every 100 American adults is in federal or state prisons or local jails — 1 in 30 men between 20 and 34, 1 in 9 black men of the same age. All told, we keep about 2.3 million adults behind bars: if the entire prison population were treated as a single city, it would be the fourth-largest in the United States, just behind Chicago and just ahead of Houston. Moreover, our incarceration rate has climbed, or rather rocketed, for the past 30 years: adjusted for population growth, there are about four times as many people in prison this year as there were in 1980. In response, we’ve hastily thrown up hundreds of prisons. But not nearly enough: facilities are strained, units are grotesquely overcrowded and space for medical and psychological services has become profoundly inadequate. We pay lip-service to the idea of rehabilitation, but we do little to make it happen. About 67 percent of the prisoners who are released are arrested again within three years. The result, to borrow a phrase from a Conservative British home secretary, has been “an expensive way of making bad people worse.”

To be fair, prominent architects aren’t lining up to take on the task of making prisons better. Most of Hohensinn’s colleagues would be happy to design a courthouse, but few are quite as eager to build a penitentiary, though the two are merely opposite ends of a single system. New prison construction is generally parceled out to a handful of large and more-or-less anonymous firms — a process that discourages innovation. Whoever gets the commission is told how many beds are needed, what kinds of security, how much room for the clinic, the recreation area, the guardhouses. They’re big-box prisons, as anonymous and uninflected as so many Wal-Marts.

Jeff Goodale, the director of correctional design at HDR, a large architectural firm based in Omaha, was disarmingly frank about what he faced. “When I got into the business in the ’70s,” he told me, “there was a very progressive approach to prison design. There was an emphasis on creating an environment that would lend itself to rehabilitation — low-rise buildings, more human scale. In the ’80s and ’90s, the trend became very much about throwing people in jail, locking them up, taking amenities away from them. We spent a fortune on security, and it did little for recidivism.” He went on to describe what he’d like to see happen instead, and it was much like Leoben. “That works great,” he said. “It doesn’t cost significantly more to build, and you save on maintenance, vandalism, lawsuits, assaults, medical care.” But, he added sharply, “at the end of the day, my clients are my clients. We’ve been told we can’t make it look too good, because the public won’t accept it.”

Perhaps that’s because most people never see prisons. The facilities at Leoben are part of a complex designed by the same architect, which houses both courtrooms and a variety of more mundane offices — the local property registrar and the like. You commit a crime, you go to jail, you go to court and, if you’re convicted, you go to prison, and the fact that all three are contiguous is meant to remind you, and everyone around you, that the process relies on a set of institutions that flow from one to the next.

By contrast, new American prisons are usually built out in the countryside, where land and labor are cheaper, and security is easier to establish. And since site selection is the first step in design, everything stems from that. A rural prison needs no public face. It needn’t articulate any sense of civic pride or communal justice, because there’s no one around to see it, beyond the prisoners themselves, the guards and the occasional visitor.

There are other social costs. As Jonathan Simon, a law professor at Berkeley, pointed out to me, convicts tend to come from cities; guards do not. Culture clashes inevitably arise. Skilled labor — doctors, psychologists and the like — is harder to find in rural areas, and so are the volunteers who work in the many rehabilitation programs. The families of working-class and poor convicts often can’t afford to travel a few hundred miles to visit their relatives. As a result, prisoners have a harder time maintaining ties with the lives they left behind.

And it isn’t only inmates and their loved ones who suffer. Almost everyone I spoke to was quick to point out that guards and inmates are essentially imprisoned together. As Michael Jacobson, the head of the Vera Institute, put it, “Officers serve life sentences eight hours at a time.” To a surprising degree, then, both groups want the same thing: They want prisons to be safer and more humane, and they believe that can best be achieved by building in more face time between convicts and their keepers. They want smaller, less anonymous units. They want more natural light. The debate over prison design shouldn’t begin and end with our asking what it’s like to live in one. We should also be asking what it’s like to work in one.

Let’s admit at once that the Leoben facility isn’t the Jesus Prison: It’s not going to single-handedly heal us and carry us up to Paradise. Even if you endorse its goals, it may not be the best implementation of them. Its windows might create an unnerving lack of privacy in a dense city. Allowances would have to be made for the breadth of our landscapes and the nature of our crimes — a prison in California, with California’s gang presence, would most likely be built differently from a prison in Vermont. What’s more, no institutional architecture can be expected to consistently manifest the clarity and elegance of Hohensinn’s design.

More to the point, it’s unlikely that anything even remotely like it will be built in this country anytime soon. John Baldwin, the director of the Iowa Department of Corrections, looked at pictures of the Leoben design and, like many people, found it both intriguing and a bit much. “We’re more focused on putting our money into mental-health and re-entry treatment units,” he told me. “I didn’t see a great deal of treatment space, or the kind of classroom space where you can teach job skills. Nice views, great basketball court, but I didn’t think Iowans want to put their money into that sort of thing.

“Still,” he said with atypical enthusiasm, “architecture is huge.” Iowa is in the process of building new facilities for both men and women. To that end, the state held a design competition and received 17 entries. While the winning submissions are not as luxurious as the Leoben prison, they do share certain principles: a smaller number of cells in each unit, more sunlight, security made deliberately unobtrusive. Other states may soon be joining Iowa, if not because they want to then because they have to. Earlier this year, federal judges in California tentatively ruled that the state release almost a third of its prisoners because the conditions in which they’re kept amount to cruel and unusual punishment. If the ruling holds up on appeal, it’s quite likely that other states will face similar sanctions. And then what?

Jim Lewis is the author, most recently, of the novel “The King Is Dead.” His most recent article for the magazine was about the design of refugee camps.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page MM48 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Behind Bars... Sort Of. Today's Paper|Subscribe